Yep…you are right. I had played around by shutting down the quicktime, ipod and itunes executables running (via task amanger) and then restarting AE. After that, it game me some similar problems but virtually disappeared after I changed my audio preferences to 22kHz (odd, I know). Now, when I restart the system, kill the exe’s and then start AE, no problem there.
I will follow your suit and dump my “latest” version of QT for an older version.
Thanks,
Milton